Get To Extraction

After getting a friend back into Warframe, we decided to do an alert that popped up. It was a special half-hour survival mission that rewarded 30,000 credits and 10 Meso relics containing Saryn Prime components. During this mission, we kinda all split up a little bit. It was inside a Grineer Galleon and we’d been given a very large, sprawling tile set with lots of large corridors and massive rooms. During this mission the words “they’re just hiding down a corridor to get that sweet damage” were muttered. But honestly, no one should be caring about damage dealt. Or damage taken. Or most kills.

You see, damage dealt, damage taken, and the other statistics at the end of a mission, are all worthless stats. Sure they give you some curious information, but for the sake of actual gameplay, they are not helpful at all. What is more important than anything else is finishing the mission, it doesn’t actually matter who did the most damage or who killed the most enemies. The game still shows all of those stats whether you complete or fail a mission. It doesn’t matter.

Okay, there are some niche reasons why you’d care. For example to report someone who’s leeching and not pulling their weight. After all, even a MR0 person who’s trying will do some damage but a leech will have no damage at all and spend all day sitting in a corner. But most of the time, those stats mean nothing.

But honestly those stats can be very misleading anyway. The number of enemies killed is pretty consistent but because weapons and abilities can “overkill” enemies, and that overkilling of enemies counts towards damage dealt. A Spin-to-Win Maiming Strike build can easily get red crits which scale up to huge amounts of damage, so you can easily appear to do more damage even if you kill far less enemies.

That completely ignores the fact though that nor everyone is there to deal damage. After all, a Trinity (at least before and after the whole Blow Yourself Up Trinity thing got nerfed) is probably not doing that much damage, she’s probably spamming Energy Vampire and/or Blessing. Or what about a Limbo? He doesn’t do any damage at all and might be spending an entire mission banishing an operative so they don’t kill themselves. Loki does no damage as well but he’s probably been spamming Radial Disarm. There are also cases like Vauban or Frost, who are there to protect the defense target or a mobile defense console. They deal some damage, but they can’t keep up with a Saryn, who effortlessly decimates maps.

Then there’s poor old Nekros. Nekros is only present in a lot of missions because of Desecrate, which means that everyone gets extra life support capsules and loot. A Nekros might bring extra slash damage but he won’t be doing much damage.

None of that means anything at all though if you can’t get to extraction in the first place. You need to finish the mission, complete the objectives and get to extraction. In one piece, ideally. Dealing damage is optional, and sometimes completely optional, in the case of a Spy mission or Rescue mission.

The end of mission stats are just that, stats. Very brief stats that are gone forever once you start a new mission. Try not to worry too much about them.